With only four days left until the release of Sustainable Brand Index™ 2015 it is time for our fourth edition of Sustainable Throwback Thursday. Every Thursday until the 23rd of March we publish a blog post analyzing interesting facts from the previous four indexes. Will this year’s index be similar to last year’s? Find out on the 23rd!

Sustainable Throwback Thursday #3: Why is IKEA less popular in Finland?

As our last throwback before Sustainable Brand Index™ 2015 is released we decided to see whether the results of some brands in 2014 varied between different countries. There are many brands that are part of the indexes in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. Among those are Volvo and IKEA.

Starting with Volvo; in Sweden they ranked number 8 out of 242 brands last year. This should be considered a very good ranking, especially since Volvo was also the highest ranked brand in the car industry. However, Volvo did not do as well in the other countries. In Finland they also topped the car industry, at place number 24 out of 103 brands in total but in Norway they were beaten by Toyota and in Denmark they were beaten by Volkswagen. Norwegians and Danes don’t consider Volvo as the obvious choice when it comes to sustainability in the car industry like Swedes do.

IKEA did very well in the 2014 index, at least in Sweden, Norway and Denmark with top 5 rankings in all three countries. But in Finland IKEA ended up in 52nd place out of 103 brands which can be considered as quite mediocre. Why is IKEA much less successful in Finland? Finland has the same number of IKEA stores as Denmark. Since last year IKEA has invested even more in Finland, will this result in a higher ranking in Finland 2015? We will see on Monday.